Pinched LCD flex cable and weird colors on display

Hello! I hope someone can help me solve my problem.  Here's my story:

I have an Inspiron 7000, Pentium 2, running Win98SE, with an 8mb ATI Rage Pro card on a 15 inch LCD display. (with, as far as I know, the latest Windows, BIOS and Video drivers installed).

The LCD color scheme is all messed up, with colors in pinks and greens (the monitor is reading black as green), and lots of shadowing of fonts.  After lots of tinkering, I've been able to make the display somewhat readable, but it's really a mess.  I hooked up a second monitor to it (a TV actually) and the color problem is NOT present on that 2nd display.  Note as well that the funky greeness is present at the start-up DELL "splash screen" before Windows even loads...hence my belief that it's a hardware problem.

My next step was to take off the right hinge cover, and I discovered that by pressing gently on the flex cable where it snakes into the hole leading to the display side--not the videa card side--the screen gets even MORE green (and more contrasty too), so my guess is that my flex cable is "crossed", or kinked, or not seated correctly in the display itself.

OK, so now what do I do?  It costs too much to send it to DELL, but I don't have a clue how to get inside the LCD casing to get to the cable connection, or how I would even go about replacing it.  Is this a do-able thing?  I'm no engineer, but if the connector is just a plug-in, I can do that (or try to unkink it), if I only knew how to get the LCD cover apart (or if I should try to get another cable from DELL and see if a local computer tech person can fix it)

Any help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED.  Thanks.

(note: pardon me in that I posted this on the "video forum" as well...I figured that maybe more people would see it if I put my question here too)